Category: Coronapanic

“My 14-Year-Old Isn’t Socially Distancing. What Should I Do?” (NYT, May 22)…

Karen the reader:

My 14-year-old daughter (who knows that I check her phone) went on what was supposed to be a socially distanced walk with her pal. Afterward, I found a TikTok draft of their attempt at a “social distance” dance, which ended up in a pile of giggles and bumping into each other. I’m disappointed, and am wondering what I should do when she asks to see her friends again.

Karen the NYT therapist:

Given this, when your daughter next asks to see her friends, you might say, “I’ve thought it over, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that you’ll be able to stay at least six feet away from your friends, especially when you miss them so much.” You might also let her know that, even though she might plan to respect the social distancing guidelines, you don’t feel good about putting her in the likely situation of needing to rebuff a dear friend’s spontaneous and enthusiastic hug.

For example, if local restrictions and the health factors in your household permit, you might see if she wants to invite her friends for an outdoor “six feet a-party” at your home or while you tag along at a public location. They’ll need to be where you can see them, even if at a distance or through a window, so that your daughter can blame you for her good behavior while enjoying the company of her friends.

Beyond coming up with practical, albeit frustrating, compromises, we can offer empathy. This often goes farther that we think. You might say, “I know that this is not what you want, and I cannot tell you how much I wish things were different. We’ll do the best we can with the options we have, but I get it if you’re really unhappy about it.”

Given that it looks like we may be in for a long haul with Covid-19, we parents will need to get accustomed to coming up with creative solutions when possible and providing generous support and compassion for the painful situations that are beyond our control. It’s not as much as we want to offer, but it’s likely to be enough to get us through.

Reader comments are almost all from like-minded Karens. If we assume the questioning Karen is the mother of the 14-year-old rebel-without-a-mask, nobody points out that anyone young enough to be the biological mother of a 14-year-old is unlikely to herself be seriously victimized by Covid-19 (if the family formerly visited elderly/vulnerable relatives in a nursing home, presumably that isn’t possible now regardless of the 14-year-old’s vigilance).

I find this interesting because parents used to be worried about 14-year-olds risking the teenager’s own welfare, e.g., by drinking alcohol (legal in much of Europe), having sex (legal in much of Europe), and taking drugs. Since 14-year-olds are essentially invulnerable to Covid-19, what we now have are parents who aren’t even bothering to try to hide the fact that they’re primarily interested in themselves (i.e., reducing an already extremely low risk of a serious consequence from an encounter between the coronavirus and a middle-aged person).

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Folks seem to be debating the best way to define “A Karen”. What about this definition-by-example?

I’m generally not an activist, but I just wrote to the University of Colorado Dean of Students to tell her how I felt that the blatant lack of mask wearing by students on hiking trails reflected poorly on the university. I suggested that her office do an education campaign.

I’ve been hiking daily, and in north Boulder nearly everyone is wearing masks on trails, but near the university almost no student-age people are.

It was actually posted by someone who, I think, identifies as a “man” and is about 40 years old, but nonetheless can this be considered the quintessential Karen quote?

(Of course, if they’re healthy enough to go for a hike, a 40-year-old Karen and a 20-year-old student are both more likely to be killed in a car accident on the way to said hike than they are to die from Covid-19.)

What kind of political beliefs does Ultimate Karen espouse? Excerpts from his Facebook status just after the darkest day in U.S. history:

I voted for Clinton because I thought she was the more qualified candidate, and because I looked forward to our kids sharing the experience of electing the first female president. …

and because he’s also quite intelligent:

To Facebook and much of social media: By enabling people to stuff their channels with self-selected and algorithmically filtered content sources as opposed to the free press of yesteryear, you essentially helped obscure the truth and mask the accuracy of what was really building.

and because he cares about Planet Earth:

To Florida: … have fun under water. Your landmass will be 25% smaller by the time our kids are in college.

and this one turned out to be unarguably correct! Florida is being smothered right now… by all of the New Yorkers who fled the 2018 tax law and now by all of the rich New Yorkers who have fled the plague!

(Why isn’t it insulting to “women” (however you want to define that term) if someone says “I voted for Clinton … because I looked forward to our kids sharing the experience of electing the first female president”? Did people who voted for Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel need to add anything to “I believed she was the best qualified person for the job”?)

Related:

• “Airlines Say Everybody Onboard Must Wear a Mask. So Why Aren’t They?” (NYT), in which Karen watches hundreds of thousands of Americans shoulder-to-shoulder in BLM protests then frets about 50 people gathering on an Airbus
• “Coronaplague is a primarily sexually transmitted disease in Massachusetts?” (Karen worries about the students unmasked on the trails but doesn’t think about what they’re doing after-hours)
• “Suddenly, Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance” (Politico): For months, health experts told Americans to stay home. Now, many are encouraging the public to join mass protests. … “We should always evaluate the risks and benefits of efforts to control the virus,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, tweeted on Tuesday. “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.” … Some members of the medical community acknowledged they’re grappling with the U-turn in public health advice, too. “It makes it clear that all along there were trade-offs between details of lockdowns and social distancing and other factors that the experts previously discounted and have now decided to reconsider and rebalance,” said Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School. Flier pointed out that the protesters were also engaging in behaviors, like loud singing in close proximity, which CDC has repeatedly suggested could be linked to spreading the virus. “At least for me, the sudden change in views of the danger of mass gatherings has been disorienting, and I suspect it has been for many Americans,” he told me. … Those protests against stay-at-home orders “not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives,” according to the letter’s nearly 1,300 signatories. “Protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.”

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A couple of previous posts about coronaplague and Russia:

• “House call coronavirus testing in Russia” (March 23), pointing out that they seemed to be ahead of Massachusetts on testing
• “New York state public and welfare health spending compared to Russia’s military budget” (April 5), wondering why New York couldn’t get organized to do the basics, such as load balance patients and hospitals

How is Russia doing according to the official WHO reports? Do we think that they will end up doing better than the U.S. when the first full year of the plague is over?

Related:

• “‘Hot’ nurse disciplined for wearing bra and panties under see-through PPE gown” (New York Post): The hospital administration originally claimed the woman in her 20s had been wearing “lingerie” — but later clarified the two-piece ensemble was possibly a “swimming suit.”

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“Norway health chief: lockdown was not needed to tame Covid” (Spectator):

the Norwegian public health authority has published a report with a striking conclusion: the virus was never spreading as fast as had been feared and was already on the way out when lockdown was ordered. ‘It looks as if the effective reproduction rate had already dropped to around 1.1 when the most comprehensive measures were implemented on 12 March, and that there would not be much to push it down below 1… We have seen in retrospect that the infection was on its way down.’ Here’s the graph, with the R-number on the right-hand scale:

Camilla Stoltenberg, director of Norway’s public health agency, has given an interview where she is candid about the implications of this discovery. ‘Our assessment now, and I find that there is a broad consensus in relation to the reopening, was that one could probably achieve the same effect – and avoid part of the unfortunate repercussions – by not closing. But, instead, staying open with precautions to stop the spread.’

Norway’s statistics agency was also the first in the world to calculate the permanent damage inflicted by school closures: every week of classroom education denied to students, it found, stymies life chances and permanently lowers earnings potential. So a country should only enforce this draconian measure if it is sure that the academic foundation for lockdown was sound. And in Stoltenberg’s opinion, ‘the academic foundation was not good enough’ for lockdown this time.

I am not expecting too many other governments to admit that they panicked and made a mistake by shutting down just as the virus was about to fade out mostly by itself.

Related:

• “Reopening schools in Denmark did not worsen outbreak, data shows” (Reuters): “You cannot see any negative effects from the reopening of schools,” Peter Andersen, doctor of infectious disease epidemiology and prevention at the Danish Serum Institute said on Thursday told Reuters. In Finland, a top official announced similar findings on Wednesday, saying nothing so far suggested the coronavirus had spread faster since schools reopened in mid-May.

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